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Miami Herald
28-03-2025
- Science
- Miami Herald
Ritualistic burials of teenagers — 5,000 years old — found in Turkey. Who were they?
Throughout human history, the leaders of society have ranged from nomadic egalitarians to pharaohs and emperors. Ancient communities of equals have seen the same success as those led by a king, but as time goes on, each form of governance eventually changes. The area of modern-day Turkey during the Bronze Age was understood to be a 'small-scale, egalitarian setting,' but new analysis of 5,000-year-old burials shed doubt on this conclusion — and raise more questions than answers. Başur Höyük is a site from the early Bronze Age located in Siirt, Turkey, that dates to the late fourth and early third millennia B.C., according to a study published March 17 in the peer-reviewed Cambridge Archaeological Journal. The site is considered a 'gateway' settlement in an obsidian-rich region near converging rivers, acting as a 'transit point' for copper and other resources from the highlands to make their way south to Mesopotamia's lowlands, according to the study. When a nearby political system collapsed between 3100 and 2800 B.C., Başur Höyük 'became a focus for the performance of conspicuous and sometimes violent funerary rites,' researchers said. In the new study, researchers analyzed subsidiary burials, or the remains of people that were buried near or around a central burial. The burials were described as 'impressive' and filled with tons of high-value goods like weapons, animal-topped amulets, sceptres, goblets, medallions and stone playing pieces, researchers said. But the more intriguing features of the burials are the human bones. 'Based on skeleton fusion and dentition, they are identified mainly as adolescents aged between 12 and 16 years,' researchers said. 'For instance, two individuals buried in a richly endowed stone tomb are estimated to have been 12 years old at time of death, while the eight subsidiary burials crammed against its entrance in Grave 17 ranged from 12 to 18 years.' The bones showed 'penetrating' blows to the head as likely causes of death, and one burial had 'staggering quantities of metalwork' including textile pins and more than 100 spearheads, according to the study. 'All the bodies associated with this grand burial rite were clothed in elaborate costumes, decorated with non-local materials, of which only the associated beadwork and fragments of textile survive, along with metal fastening pins, some of which reached outsized proportions for a human wearer,' researchers said. As researchers hoped to establish the biological relationships between the teenagers likely sacrificed together, they found that a significant portion of the bodies belonged to teen girls, suggesting a male warrior cult or initiation was unlikely. 'The fact that they are mostly adolescents is fascinating and surprising. It highlights how little thought scientists and historians have really given to the importance of adolescence as a crucial state in the human life cycle,' lead author David Wengrow told LiveScience. 'So we are dealing with adolescents brought together, or coming together voluntarily, from biologically unrelated groups to carry out a very extreme form of ritual.' However, why they were sacrificed is still a mystery. When the burials were first discovered, archaeologists thought they may have belonged to young royals who then sacrificed their attendants. But with additional research suggesting Başur Höyük wasn't a king-based society, it now seems more likely that they were buried together because of their age, and they may not be directly associated, Wengrow told the outlet. 'Much more likely, what we see in the cemetery is a subset of a larger group, other members of which survived the ritual process and went on to full adulthood,' Wengrow told LiveScience. Siirt is in southeastern Turkey, near the borders of Syria and Iraq. The research team includes Wengrow, Brenna Hassett, Haluk Sağlamtimur, William Marsh, Selina Brace, Suzanne E. Pilaar Birch, Emma L. Baysal, Metin Batıhan, İnan Aydoğan, Öznur Özmen Batıhan and Ian Barnes.
The Guardian
29-01-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Stop asking Californians when they will leave the state
Why don't you just leave? It's always an incendiary question. When you ask it of people in bad romances or miserable careers, they can be forgiven for ghosting. The word 'just' is the poison. As if leaving were simple. It is never simple. The reasons to stay in a job or a relationship – children, money, comfort, love – can be every bit as compelling as the reasons to hit the road. The same is true in California. The annual wildfires moved fast this year, and they were relentless. In less than a week, the fires razed more than 12,300 buildings in and around Los Angeles. Twenty-five people were killed. Smoke and toxins choke the air. More than 80,000 evacuees are still shut out of their neighborhoods. The fires have only just stopped raging. If you're an out-of-towner, studying the cyclical droughts and fires and surveying images of charred neighborhoods, it's tempting to urge Californians to get the hell out. Hold off. Hold the hell off. This is an extremely fragile time in California. When people lose their homes, whether in fire or evacuation, they also lose clothes, family photos, a world of creature comforts and often, most heartbreakingly, pets. In demanding that people leave their homes, we may be asking them to leave the most important thing of all: their communities and their loved ones. Is an actuary-calculated measure of safety from wildfires worth giving up intimacy and proximity to the people who make life worth living? David Graeber and David Wengrow put this calculus succinctly in The Dawn of Everything. 'There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow,' they wrote. 'And then there's the security of knowing that there are people who will care deeply if one is.' Practically speaking, people who experience disruptions after a disaster deteriorate the fastest, says Karestan Koenen, an expert in trauma at Harvard, who investigated the psychological effects of the 2018 Paradise fire in California. 'To prevent long-term mental health consequences is to address people's basic needs for a safe place to live, for food, for work,' says Koenen. And yet, the response to the California fires from some quarters has come dangerously close to impatience, even to I-told-you-so. 'The biggest thing to note about these fires in LA' said one Oregon climate expert, 'is that none of this is surprising.' No doubt this kind of observation is well-intended. But it's not the time, and it never will be. Unsurprising tragedies – an addict's overdose, a cancer patient's death – are still tragedies. I lived in New York City on 9/11. As the two enormous holes were smoking, the air suffused with asbestos and death, people from out of town kept telling me the attacks were predictable to anyone who had followed developments in the Middle East. They said I should leave. These people too were well-intentioned. And maybe they were right. But the bodies hadn't even been counted. We New Yorkers hadn't yet been able to confer with each other about the city's present dangers and possible futures. We hadn't grieved, we hadn't taken inventories of our needs and our values, we hadn't even started to plan. Eventually, in public and private discussions among ourselves, New Yorkers, together, found clarity and confidence in our personal decision-making about whether to stay or leave. Some picked up stakes. Some stayed and took heavy precautions. Some kept calm and carried on. Some played it by ear. I'd like to say, as I empty my pockets and submit my bag to security goons outside every comedy show and piano recital, that I never regretted my decision. But I rethought it constantly. Now, 24 years later, I still do. Angelenos must be afforded the same agency, autonomy and space to make – and rethink – and qualify – and act on their own choices. All of us, no matter where we live during the climate crisis, deserve that. 'Hundreds of millions of Americans are about to have a collision with planetary reality,' wrote the climate futurist Alex Steffen recently. Steffen, who teaches a course on climate and personal ruggedization, emphasizes that there is no one-size-fits-all response to that reality. Instead he urges participants to 'become native to now', 'develop a healthy relationship to discontinuity' and 'move from climate isolation to community'. Isolation – now that's something we should all leave, along with know-it-all-ism and solitary bunker-building. As fires and floods increasingly define our world, we don't need advice or loaded questions. We need solidarity, imagination and mutual respect. Virginia Heffernan is an American journalist and cultural critic
